The Battle of Binary Stars

3D ModelNoAI

Borrowed the title from the second episode of Season 1 of Star Trek Discovery for this model of two stars in a binary system. The formation of stars in pairs is a common phenomenon especially among stars more massive than our Sun. This model has been computed with the Magneto-Hydro-Dynamical code PLUTO (Mignone et al. 2007 https://ui.adsabs.harvard.edu/abs/2007ApJS..170..228M/abstract ) used for simulating the behavior of magnetized plasmas in astrophysics. The model shows the two stars and the evolution of their magnetic fields (supposed to be two aligned magnetic dipoles) and the winds of plasma emitted by each star. The winds create a zone where the plasma from each star collides while the stars orbit around each other. The lines of the magnetic field are distorted by the motion of the hot ionized gas.